In the 1st round of the 9th edition of the Pandanet Cup (the European Team Championship) played on 2 October Belgian team (Jan , Lucman, Gabriel , Roel) was smashed (0-4) by on-paper stronger Serbian team (in which played the terrible Mitic brothers, both 7-dan).

Hello dear all, it's time to *register for Pandanet league season 2018/2019*
If you don't know it, Pandanet League is an european team tournament played on Pandanet server (for preliminary rounds) followed by a qualification tournament and the final which will be played at next European Go Congress, in 2019 in Brussels !

How it work: about one game played every 3 weeks, on tuesday evening (usually start at 20h) on Pandanet Go Server. Each team has to provide 4 players for the matchs to avoid penalties. Players are selected by Team Captain (me for Belgium) ofr each match. Next season start in september and first match should be around 3rd week of september

A team is composed of 6 (min) to 12 players (max). So in order to have flexibility in the choice of players, it's better to have a full team of 12 peoples ! (It's better to have a weak player than no player at all which result in penality).

Who can participate ? Any Belgian Citizen which is a member of Belgian Go Federation.

You'll have to be ready to play on tuesday evenings (for about 2h30) and ready to be fair-play (you'll have to sign an agreement that you wont cheat, use book or bot during your games), be ready in time for the games and greet the opponents. (And in case of problem, it's the team captains who try to find an arrangement).

You want to participate for Belgium ? (which has been promoted in B-League and thus as a chance to participate to qualification tournament in june) ? Please fill this doodle and contact me here, through Facebook, or ask liusasori on KGS Go Server or answering me by email (for older team players).

In an exciting finish, Yoon Nam-gi (KR, 7d) won the Open European Championship. He ended up as the only player with 1 loss.

Behind him, 3 players ended with 2 losses, in the order of SOS tie-breaker:
- Kim Dae-hyuk (KR, 7d), who was the only who managed to beat Yoon
- Liao Xingwen, professional player (6p) from China, who was long the favourite but suffered two losses at the tailend of the tournament, against Yoon Nam-gi and against Kim Young-sam.
- Kim Young-sam (KR, 7d), the best ranked player in Europe.

The European championship was organized this year in Pisa, along with the European Go Congress.

This competition is reserved to the 32 best European players.

The system is a knock-out tournament with 2 "lives (till the 1/4 of finals).

The favorites were of course the 7 participating pros. Nevertheless, two of them failed to reach the quarter of finals:
* Andrei Kravets (UA), who lost in the 2nd round to Thomas Debarre (FR, 6d) and to Cornel Burzo (RO, 6d) in the looser's pool
* Alexander Dinerstein (RU) who surprisingly lost already in the 1st round to Johannes Obenaus (DE, 6d) and in the looser's pool to another pro, Ali Jabarin (IL).

Thus three amateurs (7-d): Dusan Mitic (RS), Cristian Pop (RO) and Stanislaw Frejlak (PL), joined five pros in the quaterfinals. But all lost, respectively against Shikchin, Surma and Lisy (proving the gap between pros and amateurs). In the only pro duel, Ali Jabarin eliminated Artem Kachanovskyi.

PS: our compatriot Lucas Neirynck (# 29 in the EGC ranking list) has the right to compete, but was promptly eliminated with all the honors : he lost in the 1st round to Mateusz Surma (PL, 2p) - one of the "big shots" - and in the 1st round of the looser's pool to Anton Chernykh (RU, 6d).